[Most convincing tilt-shift video I’ve ever seen. -egg]

Photographer Nathan Kaso spent almost 10 months making this fun tilt-shift video of Melbourne with a special focus on the city’s annual festivals and other outdoor events. This is where I always make some snarky comment about how I’ve seen enough tilt-shift work, but this video proves that when it’s good, it’s good and the manner of shooting or production just doesn’t matter. Music by Tom Day.

via Miniature Melbourne: A Tilt-Shift Video of Melbourne Having Too Much Fun | Colossal.

[If I ever save your dog from drowning or something, and you want to buy me a thank-you gift, you could do a lot worse than that pocket organizer. -egg]

This is a Maxpedition Mini EDC Pocket Organiser.  It fits neatly in my coat pocket.  I’ve always been one of those people who just stuffs their coat pockets with the stuff they might need thirty seconds before I head out of the door.  This means, in practise, that I either overstuff said pockets or that I can’t find one thing I need to stick in there.  Obviously, the older and more senile I get, the more this will become one of those idiot problems that wastes more time and mental energy than it should.  I’m going to need that mental energy for things like remembering where I live.

via Warren Ellis » EDC: What I Carry Every Day.

This is the most interesting new product since the iPhone and I don’t say that lightly.

Yeah, we could say the camera isn’t good in low light. We could say it doesn’t have enough utility. It looks dorky. It freaks some people out (it’s new, that will go away once they are in the market).

But I don’t care. This has changed my life. I will never live a day without it on.

It is that significant.

via Robert Scoble – Google+ – My two-week review of Google Glass: it all depends on the….

[Nice. Thanks, @Brandon.]

Tom Waits – Clap Hands (Circuit Bent Cover feat. Erik Parker) FREE D/L! by Adapted Records on SoundCloud – Hear the world’s sounds.

When [the next five billion] people come online, how will those all of us in the first two billion be affected?

Schmidt: These are people just like us. They’re trapped in a bad system, but they are human beings. They have the same perfection and brilliance and foibles and intuition and that we do. So the sooner we can get them the tools to get themselves organized, to get the corruption addressed, to get the healthcare better, the better off we’re all going to be. When you sit in one of these villages, and ask, how does your healthcare work, there’s a pause and they say, Well, there really isn’t any. Well then, what happens when you get sick? Sometimes you get better, and sometimes you die. It’s the most bizarre conversation. We take these things for granted, and yet this is their reality.

Cohen: The companies that originally make the tools of connectedness will come from the parts of the world that are already connected to that first 2 billion. But ultimately the best and most interesting and most creative use cases will come from the next 5 billion, because those people do more with less, and necessity drives innovation.

via Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen on What’s Next for the World | Wired Business | Wired.com.

[Slightly sensationalized writeup. Still the coolest damn thing ever. -egg]

What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they’ll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware. Whoa.

…

Rather than give out laptops (they’re actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever. Just like, “hey kids, here’s this box, you can open it if you want, see ya!”

Just to give you a sense of what these villages in Ethiopia are like, the kids (and most of the adults) there have never seen a word. No books, no newspapers, no street signs, no labels on packaged foods or goods. Nothing. And these villages aren’t unique in that respect; there are many of them in Africa where the literacy rate is close to zero. So you might think that if you’re going to give out fancy tablet computers, it would be helpful to have someone along to show these people how to use them, right?

But that’s not what OLPC did. They just left the boxes there, sealed up, containing one tablet for every kid in each of the villages (nearly a thousand tablets in total), pre-loaded with a custom English-language operating system and SD cards with tracking software on them to record how the tablets were used. Here’s how it went down, as related by OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference last week:

via Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction | DVICE.

[One of my favorite pieces by one of my favorite composers. -egg]

Max Richter records the score for ‘Disconnect’ – YouTube.

[Whoa, no way. -egg]

David Mizejewski writes:

The video below shows some fascinatingly odd animal behavior that I’ve never heard of before: baboons stealing stray puppies from their mothers and raising them as part of their troop. This kind of interspecies interaction where one species raises another species specifically for companionship and protection–in other words, keeping pets–is behavior that is typically attributed only to humans. To see it happening with baboons and dogs is nothing short of amazing.

via Baboons raise pet dogs – Boing Boing.

[This article’s overoptimistic about some stuff, I think, but interesting food for thought. -egg]

In doing the research that led to my new book, The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet, I pored over a huge wealth of data on energy, environment, and natural resources. What that data tells me is that we do indeed have very serious problems to tackle. But it also reveals that we have the resources to tackle them, if we’re sufficiently clever. Indeed, if we make the right decisions, we may very well be on the verge of an explosion in global wealth, coupled by a reduction in our depletion of the planet’s resources.

Here’s why:

The World Is Not Headed For Disaster – Business Insider.

“The internet was one of the greatest disasters to befall mankind. Now its survivors share their experiences of the tragedy.”

-| Foto-Jenn¡c |-.